Louis Theroux and Joe Rogan examine Scientology’s bizarre claims—like fetal trauma in Dianetics—and its 1993 IRS manipulation via lawsuits against employees, exposing a $50M Hollywood studio as a compliance ploy. Theroux highlights the Sea Org’s cult-like secrecy, including censorship of his film previews, while Rogan shares personal encounters with high-pressure recruitment and "go clear" costs like $50K. They critique its dangerous mental health policies, citing Lisa McPherson’s death, and compare it to Mormonism’s fraudulent origins and Trump’s wrestling-like politics. The episode reveals how rigid ideologies—from Scientology to U.S. two-party dominance—foster systemic abuse, leaving both faith and governance vulnerable to collapse under unchecked power. [Automatically generated summary]
And actually, I mean, I know there's a lot to talk about, but...
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to making a documentary about Scientology is the overabundance of material.
You know, because there's just so many ways to come in on it, and you can just chase intriguing leads, and then months go by, and you're no nearer to filming anything.
I had a lot of thoughts on this, and one of the thoughts when I was really trying to unpack it all is that I feel like one of the reasons why a lot of these people defend Scientology...
I think there's several reasons.
One, because it's their team.
And once you become a part of a team, it becomes something that you identify with, it becomes very important to you, and then you want to defend that.
So I think there's that.
But also, I think some people take some benefit in what L. Ron Hubbard created.
I'm looking at this woman, I'm like, this seems like a reasonable, intelligent, assertive, confident woman that would probably, if she didn't get into Scientology, she would have been successful in the corporate world, right?
I mean, you've said about 10 different things that I could break down and analyze.
I mean, I'm basically on the same page as you.
I think the first thing to acknowledge about Scientology is that it's a religion and that all religions have a very high portion of, you know, I'm trying to put it politely, but just bogus, fallacious, clearly nonsensical material, right?
And Scientology It's the same as all of those.
I think there's a lot of people who've derived a lot of benefit from Scientology.
I think there's people whose lives have been saved by it.
Kirsty Alley will say at any opportunity that it was Scientology that got her off drugs.
But I think you have to sort of take the whole package.
And as far as Hubbard goes, he was an only child.
He was a fantasist, a lonely guy who was also a narcissist.
And I think as a writer, I mean, one of the intriguing things about Scientology is created by a sci-fi writer, right?
Mm-hmm.
Most other religions are created by desert mystics or warriors or introspective people, but a modern-day sci-fi writer who's writing things about aliens taking over foreign galaxies, that accounts for a lot of its very bizarre inflection.
He was also abusive to his wife, wives, I think, plural.
So physically, he was abusive to them.
He was very, very troubled and suicidal.
One of the most intriguing things in Going Clear is reading this list of I think they call them affirmations, which when he was in, after the Second World War, he was wracked with self-doubt.
He thought he was a failure.
He was embarrassed about his sexual urges, his compulsive masturbation, and so on and so forth.
And he wrote down a list of things.
Do you remember this section of it where it says, You do not feel compelled to masturbate 24 times a day.
It's not literally.
You were not a disgrace to the military.
You acquitted your service in the Navy very creditably.
It was all these sort of lies he was telling himself to reassure himself that he was actually to feel okay about himself.
It's a very humanizing document because you just see all his neurotic inclinations laid bare.
That then subsequently informed his lifelong attempt to, as you say, sort of therapeutically heal himself.
And I think there's other people that identify with those.
Self sort of damaged thoughts, these thoughts where they don't like their past, they don't like who they are, they don't like the pattern that they're on, and they seek to try to change that and improve upon their position, improve upon their understanding and their acceptance of themselves.
And I think that's where Scientology does benefit a lot of people.
And so it is tricky.
Like many things in this life, it's not that black and white.
I mean, is it black and white that it's a cult and that there's a lot of damaging aspects of that?
Yes, absolutely.
It's pretty clear.
When you see the people that have tried to leave it and tell the truth about their experiences in it and how they've been harassed and hounded, yeah, that's all pretty black and white.
But I think we can, in some ways, we can sympathize with some of the people that are in it Oh, yeah.
I mean, but the other thing to say is, because you started by asking, what was it that made some people defend Scientology, and is it loyalty to their team?
But I also think that on the outer periphery, there are concentric rings of commitment to Scientology, and in the inner circle, it is extremely demanding, and I would argue abusive, and And cult-like.
On the outer circles, as you get further from the center, I think it can be relatively benign.
And especially if you're a VIP or a celebrity in which you're exposed only to the best sorts of treatment.
You're given kind of platinum card treatment.
You go to the celebrity center.
They roll out the red carpet for you.
And I think those people feel immensely indebted to Scientology.
I think that explains a lot about Tom Cruise.
Mm-hmm.
That he's only ever been treated like a prince when he's been in Scientology.
So he feels so grateful for everything that they've done for him.
This is a different thing to skirt around, but the Scientology treatment of homosexuals where they sort of shield them from the press or hide their activity and sort of...
I mean, one of the big things they're up against is most kind of malfunctioning regimes, whether it's a corporate entity or something else, you say, this isn't working, let's try something else.
So much of what happened in Scientology, this was explained to me by One of our sources in the film, a guy called Marty Rathbun, who was very high up in Scientology, he said something could be working extremely badly inside Scientology, but if it came out of Hubbard...
Then you couldn't really change it.
Hubbard apparently once said, oh, the best way to wash windows is using vinegar.
You're like, don't use Windex, use vinegar.
And because of that, whenever they washed windows in the Sea Org, in the inner sanctums of Scientology, they had to use vinegar because Hubbard said that was how you were supposed to do it.
And nothing can be changed.
It's a bit like Mormons.
I mean, now Mormons, I don't know how they got around it.
They say that you don't have to be polygamous.
But it's like turning an aircraft carrier around.
If it comes from...
Basically, if it's gospel, then how do you reform—you know, God's changed his mind is basically what you have to say.
Well, that is the real problem with religion, because we all recognize that no one person has ultimate truth, and especially when you're just going through this life trying to figure out yourself, trying to figure out what is this all about, this— Strange spinning ball that's floating in the sky and we're hurling through infinity and what is the purpose of this existence?
And there's a lot of open-ended questions that never have any answers.
So when someone comes along and they have this rigid ideology where things are very clearly defined, you must ask, who is defining these things?
Who is this person that is beyond reproach?
And when that person is a yellow-toothed weirdo that's dressed like a captain with some medals that he put himself...
On his own jacket.
And he's a science fiction author who wrote more bullshit than any human being has ever read.
But in the future, I did do the e-meter thing, but that was way later.
So this is like 1994, when I just first came to Hollywood.
I was alone in my apartment in North Hollywood, probably lonely, trying to figure things out.
Just got here.
I don't want to buy this fucking thing.
Those people sent me pamphlets and paperwork and invitations to seminars and this thing and that thing for a decade.
I mean, it just never ended.
It was like weekly, monthly, constant.
They're very, very relentless in their pursuit.
And if you looked at what their pamphlets were saying, it was all really reasonable, enticing stuff.
It was all about improving yourself.
It was all about fulfilling your goals, eliminating negative thoughts, eliminating other people's negative thoughts that are influencing the way you view your life, eliminating the effect of past experiences that were negative and that may have defined you in some way.
Yeah, all of that, but that's basically Freud, basically.
It's Freud with a lie detector.
You're hooked up to a lie detector.
That, in essence, is auditing.
The problem is, when you read Dianetics, you realise how loopy it is, in my view, and in fact...
Because sometimes, and I praise this sort of sceptical-minded approach where people say, well, what's your problem with Scientology?
You know, all religions are kooky.
But the fact is, exhibit A is just read Dianetics.
If you read the Bible, it's got loony stuff in it, but it's got passages of transcendent poetry and just parables that you can meditate on and are beautifully written in the translated English.
You read Dianetics, and it's just childish stuff about, literally, things about, oh, a lot of your problems may be because when you are in utero as a fetus, your father tried to abort you.
Your father tried to abort the fetus, and you can still remember that, and that's holding you back.
And at that time, a record was playing, and every time you hear that record, it sort of...
This sort of Pavlov mixed with really weird, totally unscientific ideas.
And then it expands to past lives.
So it's traumas or bad memories from previous lifetimes.
And at that point, I'm just like, I'm not on this ship.
But that's what we were saying earlier about rigid ideologies.
Rigid ideologies are always problematic, because there's so many open-ended questions when it comes to being a human being on Earth, and that is a problem with religions.
One of the things that religions do by creating these rigid ideologies is they make things so that you don't have to question stuff, and that gives some people comfort.
If you know that these are the rules and you don't have to think about why homosexuality is bad or why, you know, fill in the blank, whatever the issue is.
When someone defines something like that for you, it makes it so you have less questions and you have comfort in these truths, you know, air quotes.
It's bad for everyone involved because there are some things that I think we've all learned.
Be nice to people and it feels better to them.
It feels better to you.
You have a healthier existence when you have harmony with your neighbors and when you can create a good community of people that are being harmonious together and friendly together.
It's a really nice place to live.
That's pretty much a universal truth.
There's a bunch of those that exist, but even those can be debated and discussed, and you find various approaches to the end goal of happiness.
Whenever you have someone who wrote down a bunch of wacky shit like this, and then you have seemingly intelligent people defending it, like that woman that we were discussing, that woman, she did not seem stupid at all.
No, I'm sure I was reliably informed because in the film we go off and meet her ex-husband who's now no longer in Scientology and he describes her as a very sensitive, caring person.
A lot of the assertiveness she shows I think she probably acquired through Scientology and a lot of Scientology training in terms of what it imparts to people It's one of the reasons that I think it appeals a lot to actors because it works,
I think, for people who have any sort of insecurity or who are going into situations of uncertainty and It allows you to almost reprogram your circuits in some way and be okay about using assertive body language and speech.
And it also imparts the sense that you have all the truths necessary to save humanity from itself, not just humanity on Earth, but throughout time and space.
And it is your obligation to ensure that those truths are saved for posterity and communicated as widely as possible.
In a totally unadulterated fashion, because any adulteration of the message means that not only do they not work, they become toxic and dangerous.
It seems to me that there's a bunch of things going on, and that there's some aspects of it that maybe could be beneficial, that they could extract from that.
Yeah, but one of the funny things is once you have Scientology lite, it's called the Indy movement, independent Scientology, and it's often an analogy is made with Martin Luther and Protestantism, you know, when people said, you know, there's nothing in the Bible about the papacy, really.
There's nothing about selling indulgences and having palaces in Rome, in the Vatican.
So actually, really, there's just stuff in the Bible about following Jesus and reading the Bible.
So shouldn't that be what we're doing?
And so they go off.
You have Protestantism.
The trouble with the independent movement is it turns out that if you remove the rather predatory money-raising side and the sort of fundamentalist controlling side, you get something a bit wishy-washy that's more or less indistinguishable you get something a bit wishy-washy that's more or less indistinguishable from many other sort of self-help It sort of loses its potency.
It's almost that the authoritarian dimension of Scientology and the way in which it demands total obedience from its followers is intrinsic to its ability to have an effect.
And one of the things I talk about in the film is, I mean, we talk as well about the appeal of Scientology.
Why do people defend it?
So it works for some people.
I think there's an obvious thing of...
The thin end of the wedge, you know, you get in knee-deep and then you think, well, I've come in this far, so even though I've got doubts, I'll go a little further.
And then you sort of reach a tipping point of commitment where it becomes almost embarrassing to back out.
You're sort of $100,000 or more in.
You're 10 years in.
Your family is annoyed with you.
A lot of them you don't see.
It's very hard to walk away from that commitment.
So there's all these powerful, compelling reasons for why.
But the other part of it is, and this is the part that I as an outsider appreciate and I own up to in the film, is that there's something grandiose.
It's a bit like Trump, right?
You see these gilded casinos, you see these towering, shiny buildings, you know, they're kind of over the top and grotesque, but they're also sort of majestic and imperial.
And if you ever watch Scientology footage, some of it's on YouTube, and you see how they are very good at a certain kind of over-the-top aesthetic.
Do you know what I mean?
Almost a kind of Lenny Riefenstahl-esque with lights and flaming braziers and thousands of people surging upward in unison.
And it has an effect.
You sort of think, wow, these guys know how to run a show.
Yeah.
If you go into any org – have you been into an – they call them orgs, right?
short for organization okay so near where I'm staying in Los Feliz there's one it's on Hillhurst I think and you go in and it feels like you're kind of in a religious library sort of sort of designed by Jay Peterman you know that like the catalog company and it has sort of old globes and kind of distressed wooden furniture and wicker chairs and it feels like it's got like a slightly colonial golden age of exploration feel Do you know what I mean?
And it feels very sort of swept up in this narrative of we're in a place where there's adventure and a sense of order, and actually there's a sort of seductive quality to it.
The Basilica, which was just, to me, the most amazing thing I think I've ever seen as far as like a human creation, the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life, other than Chichen Itza, other than the Mayan pyramids.
I was just stunned by the amount of work and the hundreds of years of work that had gone into creating that.
But when you're there, the overall scale of it is so immense that it makes you feel...
It makes you feel small.
It makes you feel insignificant in the greater picture.
And I think that that's a big factor with a lot of religions is to eliminate the power of the individual by making you feel diminished by the sheer scale of what you're seeing and the hall that you're in.
would add in, which is, you know, last year, slightly on the back of doing the Scientology program, I was living in the UK and I was trying to get a program going about fundamentalist Islam, or not even fundamentalist, actually,
beyond where it's extreme radical Islam, so-called, you know, basically beyond where it's extreme radical Islam, so-called, you know, basically people who support ISIS, of which there are some in the UK, although they're hard to interview because it's actually a crime to glorify terrorism, is what it's called, and so they have to talk very gingerly around the subject.
But if you get into a debate about someone who is sincerely committed to ISIS brand of Sunni Islam, right, where they're saying, actually, Yeah, sex slaves are okay.
They'll say, like, slaves isn't quite the right term, but we approve of that, and blah, blah, blah.
And then they say, well, by what authority do you challenge what we believe, right?
When you start coming at them with some kind of humanistic, secular, liberal sort of view of life...
And you try to explain, well, I'm not basing my...
I don't have an authority as such.
You know, like, I'm not preaching a religion.
I'm just saying, you know, it's kind of better to be nice to people.
And they say, but based on under what authority?
Like, you find that you actually don't really have...
It's surprisingly difficult when you're thrown back on first principles to make the case...
For a sort of sensitive, secular way of doing things.
You know, one of the appeals of, I think, whether it's Scientology or Islam or Christian, extreme Christianity, you know, whatever form that takes, they can say, like, we have all our answers.
They're in a book.
And God told us.
So who told you?
And I'm like, well, no one told me.
I'm relying on a two-millennia-old tradition, you know, founded in, you know, Greco-Roman times, you know, with various people, you know, interpreters over the years.
But actually, you know, I can't really articulate that in ten words.
Do you know what I mean?
And it's surprisingly hard.
So once you're in the prison of A faith-based system, it's very hard to kind of leverage your way out.
I didn't do a good job of trying to get them out, basically.
Yeah, you're like, I don't have a book, like, whatever we call the other way of doing things, you know?
And also, you don't want to say, like, well, in Western tradition, you know, you're trying not to, because whether we like it or not, all our beliefs have some sort of geographic and temporal specificity to them.
As much as we might want to say that there are golden rules that exist through time and space, I don't think there really are.
And so you're having to say, well, you know, over the last few hundred years since the Enlightenment, we've found that in general torture is not a brilliant idea and capital punishment is not great and slavery is largely discredited.
And they say, well, so this is about the Western Enlightenment.
That's your authority.
And I don't want to be kind of basing it on that.
So I just I slightly made a hash of it.
After I did the interview, my producer said to me, yeah, I think he kind of owned you in that interview.
The guy who's like the ISIS defender, he's now doing he's doing he's in prison now.
That was one of the reasons we didn't finish the documentary.
Anyway, that's sort of going off on a tangent slightly.
It's very weird in a lot of ways, which I am in many ways left-wing.
So when I read what they're saying, I agree in some ways.
But outside of actual real harassment, I just don't think that you should be able to just ban someone because they call someone a bitch or call someone ugly.
We're off on a tangent slightly, but it was around the time of Charlie Hebdo, which everyone was marching for the right to be offensive, right?
And around the same time, trolling became a buzzword, and it was the idea that we should stop trolling.
And there's a certain disconnect we're living through as a culture to do with Wanting to defend the right to be offensive but also come down hard on trolling and actually at a certain point You can't have it both ways.
Well, I'm gonna say I what I heard was and because I understood this was some people saying Absolutely, it's a crime.
It's hideous.
And people have the right to be, you know, to be offensive.
But I'm not going to valorize the message or even hold these people up as free speech martyrs any more than I would do if Tom Metzger or a neo-Nazi was killed.
He does not thereby become a hero.
He becomes a victim of a lynch mob, of a murderous campaign.
In other words, so I don't, I'm sympathetic to people who feel that absolutely it was a crime, it was hideous, you know, Islamofascists killed Charlie Hebdo, but that does not thereby make Charlie Hebdo's message a laudable or creditable one.
Well, let's bring it back to Scientology, because that's one of the interesting things about Scientology, is that anyone who is a quote-unquote opponent of Scientology, they are allowed to violate pretty much all of their principles and just go after you.
And a lot of stuff in Scientology is based on Hubbard's naval experience.
They dress up in naval uniforms, and he loved things like...
Little, you know, bulletins or anything that felt kind of quasi-military and, you know what I mean?
In a way, it's a mixture of some military kind of naval stuff and then some corporate style stuff.
What it isn't is a lot of religious stuff.
Like that is the one thing that you don't get a flavor of in terms of the way they dress and drill.
There's some show business.
You know, you've got a little touch of Hollywood.
You've got a touch of navel.
You don't have any sense of it being kind of spiritual or religious.
I'm talking in the way they style themselves, the language they use.
They're constantly using abbreviations that are more or less unintelligible to the outsider, which, by the way, is a lot of how allegedly, according to experts on thought reform or cults, so-called, they say that by learning a new language, it's part of what kind of gets you caught up in they say that by learning a new language, it's part of what kind of gets you caught Well, that's also military people.
And I think as well, I mean, this is something I mentioned before.
It is important to bear in mind as well that As much as Scientology kind of casts the world in us and them terms, which is very characteristic of a lot of systems of thought that are inimical to freedom or free way of thinking, it's us and them.
It's like Bush saying, you're either with us or against us.
And in Scientology, in a famous statement of Tom Cruise's that he gave in 2004 when he was given a Freedom Medal of Valour at a big Scientology awards ceremony in England, He said, you're either playing on the pitch or you're out of the arena.
Well, you know, I'm going to sound weird now because one of my promises that I made to myself was that I would never gratuitously mock the beliefs of Scientology.
And one of the things they find offensive is to reveal some of the secret truths that are unveiled.
Okay, I'll take a step back.
Unique to Scientology is that it's a mystery religion, meaning that many of its beliefs are unveiled as you advance up the ladder of enlightenment, okay?
So you don't at day one get told, unlike with Jesus and Christianity, on day one you're told he died on a cross for your sins, believeth in him, and you will be saved and go to heaven.
There's no kind of catch or later sort of amendment that gets made when you're a year, two years, three years down the line.
In Scientology, you learn more as you go up.
Some say that this is partly something that it owes to Crowley, or Alistair Crowley, I think it's pronounced, and that Hubbard had practiced a form of Satanism when he was living in Pasadena in the 40s right after the Second World War and incorporated that aspect of it.
And it is quite a seductive idea, the idea, oh, I'm going to learn more as I go on, a kind of unraveling mystery.
So that is part of Scientology.
And when you get to the OT levels, which is once you've gone clear, which...
So to begin with, going clear was originally the best thing you could do, and then subsequently he added more levels and more layers, and you get to the OT, and there's eight published OT levels, and OT3, various secrets are revealed.
And allegedly, if an uninitiated OT or an uninitiated person is shown the secrets, it makes them go crazy.
But one of the things that...
And every documentary about Scientology rejoices in telling you what the OT stuff is.
And I think you were about to touch on it.
I promised myself that I wouldn't...
It's a little cheap when all these documentaries say, you know, $100,000 in or $200,000 or $500,000, you're going to learn what happens at OT3. And then they spoil the surprise for everyone.
And I also felt like I'd like to be able to say to, if I ever meet a Scientologist, I mean, I'm sure I've met some, but without knowing it, but you know, if I ever meet Tom Cruise or Beck, I want to be able to say like, you know what, I didn't ever do anything.
I just, I have a right to know my truth and express my truth.
I don't want to mock you.
I don't want to make, you have a right to believe what you want to believe.
And if you think, you know, no more than I'd force a Jewish guy to eat pork or tell a Rastafarian he had to cut his hair.
And so I'm not going to say to an OT, you know, I know what happens at OT3 and it sounds like a bunch of junk.
Well, you don't even have to say it's a bunch of junk, but just expressing, I think there's what we know, okay, what we know about their doctrine or their, whatever you want to call it, their scripture.
And there's an amazing moment in the documentary, the HBO documentary, where was it?
And I think, you know, depending on how your karma is, that's number one.
Number two, which is even more important or just as important, is that you can carry your memories through the lifetimes using Scientology.
And the gift that Scientology gives you is the ability to retain your memories and your identity across multiple lifetimes.
And that's why it's so important to a Scientologist to recollect his or her past lifetimes because it suggests that you're now on your cosmic destiny and you will carry it forward when you next incarnate.
I mean, they're interesting, but when you know the source of all of it, and yet they ignore it, and they choose to not pay attention to the other things that he read, or wrote rather, like Battlefield Earth, that movie with John Travolta.
Well, he was upset that they showed that video of him, you know, saluting, you know, to LRH, you know, they salute when they got the medal, all that crazy shit.
So it's sort of insurance, because they want to be able to use the...
They spend a lot of money on the commercial, and they don't want to be embarrassed when the Scientologist, who's the star of the commercial, leaves Scientology and says that they were brainwashed.
Intellectually, when I sit back and I look at the many, many different religions and many, many different ideologies that people subscribe to, and The vast amount of people out there that are searching for truth and answer and something to belong to, even that, even though all those things make sense to me intellectually, I'm still fascinated.
I'm still so puzzled that in 2016, with the internet, with all the access to information that we have today, that that still exists.
And you look forward and you wonder, is this going to fizzle out?
But I think what they've done is they've kind of created a marketing juggernaut that is, if not immune to, but at least highly resistant to any attempt to discredit or undermine.
So I read a thing that said, well, it's religion that sells secrets, right?
That's its USP. So that will be...
Scientology's Waterloo will be the fact that we now have searchable data.
But it shows no signs of coming apart.
You know, the numbers may not be high, but the amounts of revenue coming in are huge, from what I can tell.
And I get the feeling that, well, you just have to see how...
The amount that they're able to spend on advertising, the number of new buildings that go up.
So however small it may be, it has a huge punching power.
So it's thunder was stolen by Going Clear, but it's also an excellent book and a great primer.
If you enjoyed Going Clear, I highly recommend Inside Scientology.
And she points this out, that in 1950...
McDonald's was invented and so was Dianetics.
So they basically kind of, it's a franchise system in which they are sort of selling, they own the property of the various buildings in which Scientology is sold, and then they license the materials, but they can't really, you know, some of the franchisees can lose money, but Scientology itself can't really lose money because they're just getting rents from the people who are selling the Scientology.
And so, yeah, I think once that's in place, I think the other part of it is, so one of their routes for finances, you pay for services, you turn up, you spend, I want auditing, so I'll get an auditing package for $300 and you get whatever, five sessions.
But the other thing is they solicit donations and five or six times a year, they have large events.
And that's the footage of Tom Cruise is at one of these events And they're like these huge Hollywood-style award ceremonies where they pack hundreds of Scientologies into an auditorium.
And they both look quite impressive.
So to the outsider, they look kind of grandiose and impressive.
But they are, in essence, a kind of live infomercial event where everyone who's there is then aggressively...
regged, which means they're aggressively hit up for donations.
Does that make sense?
So anytime you see one of those events, all those people who are at the event, before they can leave, someone comes up to them and says, how committed to Scientology are you?
We would sincerely appreciate an expression of your support.
And they guilt-tripped into making a donation, a tax-deductible donation.
And I'm sorry, I know I'm rambling, but there's a lot of information.
So So they get huge amounts of money for that, and that money then, one of the good things about that is that can never be revoked.
One of the problems they had in the past was, if you spend $10,000 on credit...
And say, I love Scientology.
This is going to be amazing.
And then you, like, $1,000 into your services, you're like, this isn't doing anything.
I want to leave.
And then you ask for your money back, and it's very hard for you to get your money back.
Whereas the donations that are made to something called the IAS, Association of Scientologists, you can't get those back once you leave.
Anyway, I'll make it very simple for you.
There's very rich Scientologists who make large donations, basically.
There's a guy called Bob Duggan who's a multi-billionaire.
I had a neighbor who was a Scientologist, and he wanted to buy a piece of property, and we had a discussion about this, how I found out he was a Scientologist.
He said out of nowhere, you know, we start talking about this.
He's like, yeah, I'm thinking about buying it, but right now my wife is about to go clear.
And I go, this is a long time ago.
I go, what does that mean?
And then he starts expressing what it means and that...
She's no longer going to be influenced by negative thoughts, and this is going to cost $50,000.
And I'd been fascinated with Scientology going back to the late 80s when I was a student.
And then I remember in 90 or 91, I took a tour around the L. Ron Harvard Life Exhibit there on Hollywood Boulevard.
And had this weird feeling of...
If you've ever gone in where you just think, wow, it's like they took a person who was kind of an average sci-fi writer and attempted to make him sound like he was the second coming of Jesus.
And so everything is spun and it's just a weird feeling, you know, seeing a whole museum dedicated to someone who seems to have been a relatively unremarkable...
Do you know what I mean?
And so they're working extremely hard, saying like, he was one of the youngest ever Eagle Scouts to ever qualify in the state of Montana.
And you're like, well...
And I was like, my dad was an Eagle Scout.
That's not that big a deal, is it?
And so then I remember halfway through, I thought, well, this was funny for 10 minutes.
And then an hour later, when you're on this guided tour, I've had enough.
And so I said, I really need to leave.
And he said, well, where do you need to go?
Like, what's so important that it's more important than you see in the rest of it?
And I suddenly felt under pressure, that uncomfortable feeling of like, oh, wow.
And I had to pretend that I needed to be somewhere just to get out of the building.
Anyway, so years go by and I think I'd love to make a program about it.
And then I could never quite find...
I approached them and they said, long story short, we're not really interested.
You know, they took me on a tour of the Celebrity Center.
They strung me along for a bit, but it was pretty clear quite quickly that they weren't going to let me in.
So a few more years went by and...
I was approached by a Hollywood producer called Simon Chin who made Man on Wire and Searching for Sugar Man.
So he's well-credentialed.
And he's like, you know, you should do something about Scientology.
I gave him the spiel about why I hadn't because they won't let me in.
And as you know, my way of making documentaries is by invitation.
You know, I make an approach and people say yes, and they let me in.
Whatever, you know, big game hunting or the Westboro Baptist Church or gurus in India.
But it's always, I say, like, can we come and film?
They say yes, and we do it.
So I just couldn't get my head around how you make a film where the people don't want you to make the film, as I knew they didn't, and have it be still true to what I do in some way.
And I didn't want it to be a kind of just poking them for the sake of it type of thing.
Anyway, we decided that there was a way of doing it using reenactments in which we took a sort of meta approach to the reenactments, where the whole process of casting and reenacting how you do Scientology using actors...
Was filmed.
In other words, we filmed casting a character to play Tom Cruise, casting an actor to play David Miscavige, and role-playing the different lines, and used ex-Scientologists to kind of co-direct.
So they were like, this is how you do it, and this is what Scientology is, and this was what it was like when I was in Scientology.
And really, part of it was knowing that once we did that in and around Hollywood, that because Hollywood is so central to Scientology, they would get wind of what we were doing and would start coming to us.
So there'd be this wraparound of them and children, they'd start filming us.
And it turns out they were making a documentary about me making my film about Scientology.
I think it'll be a lot like what they have done to other journalists.
They did one to Gibney.
They did one on Larry Wright.
They do them on ex-Scientologists if they're of sufficient kind of profile.
It'll be a 10 to 15 minute thing.
They'll extract any photograph where I look like a dick or ugly or ludicrous.
Any ill-advised bit of publicity I ever did where I was promoting a series and I looked goofy.
They'll say, this is a serious journalist.
And then they'll take quotes from interviews out of context to make me sound like either a goofball or kind of malicious deceiver.
And, you know, if you want to really see the DNA of Scientology, I often think, because occasionally I get caught in this mindset of like, you know, what is so, what is, it's just another religion.
There's no better or worse than other religions, really.
And then some, you know, you know, sometimes you can slightly lose, you go native slightly, or you're on their websites and you're thinking like, some of this makes sense.
But If you look at how they attack their enemies, they're so unlike other religions, certainly unlike Christianity for the most part.
So official Scientology's pronouncements when they attack ex-members and journalists are so tabloid and childish and so malicious and nasty...
You really see into something deep about their mindset.
Because their view, as you mentioned, is that if you're a suppressive person, i.e.
someone who's attempting to hold Scientology back, then you are fair game.
They could do almost anything to try and put you out of business.
And when I was doing the film, I went in, not exactly undercover, but I went in...
Not for a sequence in the film, just to sort of keep myself grounded, to keep it all real.
You know, because one of the challenges with when you're not exposed, you're not actually having day-to-day contact with the subject that you're covering, it's very easy to slip into a us-and-them mentality of your own.
And you're like, ooh, scary Scientologists, ooh, they're bad.
And actually, you know, they're not.
They're good people, many of them.
So I wanted to make them real, and I went along to Scientology Org and just sort of chatted to some people and said, you know, I make documentaries, I'm interested in this subject, you know, what's it all about?
And they really did, one of the things they do is a fairly hard sell, but you got the impression that they would 100% kind of take your money.
And one of the things Tom Cruise talks about when he's in his video is PTSP, confronting shattering suppression.
I don't think I even said they got my acronym right.
But anyway...
His thing is, he says one of the best things he learned in Scientology was how to confront and shatter suppression, right?
So any time you see him in an interview, and there's a few of them on YouTube where he thinks he's getting a cheeky question, you can see he kind of gets a steely look where it's a sort of, it's not exactly adversarial, it's just like, no, you're out of line, buddy.
I mean, as much as I say there's a big chunk of it that feels kind of valid and normal, maybe even therapeutic, but when you tip into thinking that you're the authority on mental illness and That's dangerous.
And individual issues with people that you have not diagnosed, you don't have any medical training whatsoever, you don't know what their specific neurochemistry is, you don't know the effect of the medication and whether it's enhancing or hurting them, and you just have this blanket view of psychiatry.
That was an issue that L. Ron Hubbard had.
And if you go down Sunset, Yeah, I think it's Sunset.
I think there's a real argument that there's a lot of people that are on antidepressants that shouldn't be on antidepressants.
I think there's a lot of natural alternatives, one of them being exercise, one of them being enhancing your standing in life in terms of what you do for a living or where you live or the people that you hang out with.
All those things can affect the way you feel and that can be interpreted as depression.
There's a lot of I mean, there's a reason if your life is shit, if all the aspects of your life is shit and you feel bad, the solution's not a pill, right?
So I think in some ways they've got something to say that makes some sort of sense.
But in a weird way, though, that's the dangerous part because it's where Scientology intersects with a totally valid...
Social critique, right?
The trouble is, if you have someone who's heavily psychotic, and it's not a medication-induced psychosis, you know, psychosis is a real medical phenomenon, and Scientology's not going to take them on.
If you go to Scientology and say, I'm interested in Scientology, I've had a couple of psychotic breaks, but I really think you could help me out, they're not going to say, Oh, come with us.
If I'd said I was on Zyprexa for 10 years because I had an episode when I thought I was a poached egg for a few weeks, she would have said, well, good luck with that and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
We don't go into this in the documentary, but you can read up on the internet about cases where there's been people who had mental illness either within Scientology.
I mean, perhaps the most famous scandal within Scientology...
Or the most notorious to Scientology watchers was the case of Lisa McPherson.
She's done in detail in Inside Scientology in the Janet Reitman book.
She was a paid-up Scientologist, took it very, very seriously.
A young woman, maybe 30...
And she had a psychotic episode in Florida.
And instead of being taken and given bed care in a facility, she was taken by Scientologists from a hospital and more or less sequestered in a hotel for a week or maybe longer and died in the hands of the Scientologists.
You know, the main guy in the film is a guy called Marty Rathbun, and he was...
There's a sense in which the film is as much about him as it is about Scientology.
He was a Mr. Fix-It within Scientology.
He was the number two to David Miscavige.
David Miscavige is the guy who took over in 1986 or thereabouts from L. Ron Hubbard and has been running it ever since.
He's an unaccountable leader who is, in essence, the Pope of Scientology.
And there are many allegations of him being physically abusive towards his followers.
Marty Rathbun was his right-hand man for many years.
Marty Rathbun left in 2004 or thereabouts.
So he's sort of our deep throat in the film.
But he also cops to the fact that when he was in Scientology, he was involved in all kinds of devious, covert activity involving private investigators.
Destruction of documents and also a certain amount of physical violence himself, which he, you know, has apologized for.
And so he, it becomes a sort of examination of him and his ability to, the fact that he's been seduced by this thing, and it's still in certain ways, it's still in him.
You know, by, almost by definition, you can't be in something that long and that You know, Leah Remini was a celebrity parishioner, right?
She was going around the celebrity center, she was doing Scientology, but she was not in the Sea Org.
The Sea Org is this clergy, it's the inner saint.
It's the difference between someone who goes to a Catholic church a few times a year, right, and eats communion and prays a few times a year.
You can be a Scientologist in that way, right?
Which maybe your neighbor was.
But if you're in the Sea Orc, it's somewhere between being in the Vatican and being a monk.
You're leading a kind of Spartan existence to save the planet.
You sign a contract for 40 billion years or something.
I think it is literally.
Because it's supposed to cover all your future lifetimes, right?
So when you come back, you're still in the Sea Orc.
In fact, their slogan is something like "Vein Arbimis" or whatever the Latin is, it's "We come back," meaning like we come back in future lifetimes and we're still going to be in the Sea Org.
Anyway, so it's really important to get that distinction because, you know, I wouldn't want people to have the impression that everyone in Scientology is sort of going around in a uniform marching around on a power, you know, in a vow of poverty.
That's just the Sea Org guys.
And most of them live down, many of them live down in Hemet, outside LA. And that's where...
But I think a lot of that is to do with, someone explain this to me, one of the rules about a non-profit or about being a religion, having their religious status, is they cannot hoard their income.
Like money that comes in has to be spent, otherwise they're in violation of their charitable status.
So, someone just told me this the other day.
So, in other words, they have to kind of keep buying buildings because there needs to be a cash outflow.
No, because actually, don't you remember in Lawrence Wright's book, there's a bit where Tom Cruise explains, I think maybe to Nazanin Boniardi, like his girlfriend at the time, he says, don't you...
By the way, she was considered an SP because her father was a psychiatrist, I believe.
Anyway, so he went out with a woman called Nazanin Boniardi for a while, and there's a section in Going Clear where they talk about – I think – Miscavige came around for dinner or something, and I think it was...
Anyway, his girlfriend at the time was having trouble understanding what Miscavige was saying, because he speaks quite fast.
I think he's viewed, I don't know, Marty Rathbentop.
That's allegedly.
Can I throw an allegedly in there?
Allegedly, they have a bad view of him.
A lot of what I'm saying is based on, you know, once he blew, once he left, Marty Rathbun spilled his guts on the internet in order to let people know what was going on.
And he was the biggest thing, I would say, in terms of exposing Scientology for what it is, probably in the history of Scientology.
John Travolta's wife was on Fear Factor, and I got to meet John Travolta because his wife was in the finals.
She lost to Coolio, who was...
By the way, you want to talk about a guy who performs very well under the influence of marijuana.
Coolio might be at the top of my list, right up there with Joey Diaz.
Coolio, they would open up his trailer, and it was like a Cheech and Chong movie.
It was hilarious.
And he would go out there, and he would perform these stunts just high as a kite.
I mean just gone because you look in his eyes They were just glazed over and he would perform flawlessly and the last stunt involved balance It was his balance thing and I had a conversation with him before we did it and I was unfortunately stone-cold sober at the time I believe and Coolio was he's like I've done this a million times in a million different lives in other universes.
Well, again, my neighbor, my former neighbor many years ago, was a very nice guy.
And I've met a lot of Scientologists inside of Hollywood, and they all have this actor-y thing going on, which is, I would like to believe that they are as nice as they're pretending to me, but I'm not sure.
Yes, and I know one of my early experiences when I was talking to a Scientologist when I was trying to first negotiate access to the church back in 2003 was I'd sent her some old documentaries that I'd done.
So this is who I am, this is what I do.
And she was on the phone and she said, oh yeah, I got the DVDs and I was watching them.
And she started laughing in the act of talking about...
What if everybody started doing whatever this is, this new thing, which eliminated, became prevalent throughout the world, eliminate, like, vaccinations, right?
Pretty much...
I would estimate high 90% of the Western world is vaccinated.
Every now and then I meet some kid who had hippie parents and they gave him apple cider vinegar and they never vaccinated him.
A few of those exist.
But for the most part, most people are vaccinated to prevent against diseases.
If we came up with some sort of a vaccination to prevent the more disgusting aspects of human beings, negative behavior, aggression, meanness, it'd be very curious, very curious as to how that would play out, whether or not that would diminish ambition and progress and who knows.
Yes, I think it was, yeah, it's like you said, the yin and the yang.
I think Scientology aspires to be that, you know, and I think the danger of it is it would bear certain similarities to a sort of almost fascist vision, I think.
I mean, I think that there is an overlap there, you know, the cult of health.
The cult of glowing, smiling, beacons of health and humanity marching up and down.
And actually, it's our ability to rub along with difficult characters and to sort of embrace the ugly side.
I can't define exactly what it is, but it feels like that's an important dimension of life.
Well, it certainly seems to be that there's a dynamic that plays out between human beings and that we learn not just from the positives but also from the negatives.
And I learn a lot from other people's negative behavior how to never be like that myself without having to make those same mistakes.
Also learn from my own mistakes, I'm sure.
But when we see horrible things in the news and negative things, I think that does sort of reinforce how fortunate you are that you're not experiencing those horrible things and that there is some sort of an understanding of the worst aspects of people where it broadens your spectrum of possibilities.
Hunter Thompson or William Burroughs or, you know, Philip Roth, if you like, you know, talking about the absolute, the most kind of contemptible and disgusting impulses we feel.
Bukowski.
Oh, yeah.
You know, that's absolutely...
Rambeau, you know, the French poet.
This is sort of like...
This is who we are.
This is the stuff of life.
I think it's ineradicable.
And I think I'm suspicious of anything...
That pathologizes it too much and says, you know what, that's sort of...
Which Scientology does, in fact.
They say that's your reactive mind.
It's a malfunctioning part of your mind.
It's a pseudo-scientific thing.
Whereas, actually, Christianity, I'm not a Christian, but it sort of embraces the fact that it's just your human side.
Your human side is earthly and twisted and sexual, and actually you need to embrace some sort of higher being.
Well, I think most religions or ideologies that are trying to promote some sort of advancement, they look to the past and to the horrific nature of animal behavior, the tooth, fang, and claw of the wild, and the recognition that somehow or another we've emerged from that and that we aspire to do better.
And then we know that in our own lives, I mean, if you look at your own life as a microcosm, You've sort of figured out what you've done wrong, hopefully, and have advanced past those days of youth and foolish behavior, and you're now a wiser, more educated person, and you seek to continue to advance and continue to do better.
So it's sort of like it's all analogous.
It all sort of ties in together.
Now, when people go too hard with that, when people go too hard with eliminating the bad behavior, I always wonder if, like L. Ron Hubbard himself, if he was, you know, when we talk about him self-diagnosing and self-treating, if that's what they're doing as well.
It's like, do you know that, like, there's an old expression that, well, there's an old thing that you see with women that are, what's the best way to put this?
Sexually loose, that they always like to point the finger at other girls that are sexually loose.
It's like one of the first indications that a girl might be a slut is that she likes to point at other girls, and that's a real common thing.
And I think that the things that annoy you the most about yourself, you tend to highlight those aspects when you discuss human beings or other people that irritate you.
They say, yes, my dad likes to quote, there's a Bulgarian philosopher and writer called Elias Kaneti who's had an aphorism that the thieves' hell is the fear of thieves.
So that we sort of project our qualities to others and it fills us with anxiety that they may be that.
To go to the other point, though, it would be wonderful to feel that we advance through life acquiring wisdom.
I don't know that it's necessarily the case.
And what strikes me about Hubbard is...
You know, the merit that you see in Scientology, the bits that feel workable and make sense, seem to have come out fairly early on.
And then later on, the stuff he was coming out with was more and more outlandish.
Whatever therapies he was evolving, when it went to the OT levels, it was really getting properly out there.
I mean, whether that...
Maybe he was spiraling out.
I mean, there's allegations that he...
Was fully mentally ill, at least for episodes, towards the end of his life.
And so he had a sort of ocean-going religion where they were...
Kind of traveling around, and then for a while he was in England, and then for a while he was in what was then Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, sort of trying to find a niche, like find a kind of new frontier that he could more or less make for his own kind of claim for Scientology.
But then even when he came back, he was so caught up in lawsuits in the last 10 or 15 years of his life, people pursuing him for money because they...
They felt that Scientology had made them psychotic or they just thought it was fraudulent or that they wanted their money back.
He had to disappear and was living in seclusion, more or less hiding out while money was kind of shuttled back and forth to him.
And that's why I said at the beginning that the problem with Scientology is an overabundance of material.
I think chat shows, as you put them, they're pretty much bullshit anyway.
Because what they really are is you have a seven-minute chunk where you're supposed to be promoting some movie about a super spy that fucking repels down from the ceiling and gets past lasers.
One of the things I learned was members of the Sea Org who have taken this vow of poverty live extremely abstemious, cloistered lives, and they're not allowed to go to the movies for the most part, except when a Tom Cruise movie comes out.
So you know it better have a positive, uplifting message.
You know, I just think it's an unfortunate aspect of our society that, and this is a reality, if Tom Cruise is gay, it would be a very smart business move for him, with his business, to stay in the closet.
Because he's a leading man, and he's a leading man that has love affairs in these movies with women.
And you cannot do that if you're gay.
It's one of the weird things about being a gay person, even in today's liberated and very progressive society, that a woman can be gay, and she can play a straight woman in a movie, because no one cares.
Like, if a guy meets a girl, and she's beautiful, but she's been gay her whole life, and he turns her out, and all of a sudden she's heterosexual, and then he winds up marrying her and having children with her, Like, men get excited.
But if a woman meets a guy who's been just blowing dudes for the past 20 years, and then all of a sudden decides he's not gay anymore, they're not excited about that.
They're like, are you sure you're not gay?
Like, I don't even know how I feel about this.
We don't accept a gay person, yet at least, playing a straight man who's a leading man in a movie.
I don't think there's anyone who's been able to pull that off.
There's that one dude, Doogie Howser.
The Doogie Howser dude.
He played like a womanizer in some sitcom, but nobody's buying that bullshit.
Well, there's an issue with them going after detractors and people that leave because it doesn't really exist in other organizations or other religions.
A perfect example of another religion that was most obviously created by a con man is Mormonism.
Joseph Smith was 14 years old when he claimed to find golden tablets that were the lost work of Jesus and that only he could read them because he had a magic seer stone.
It was a story that was created in 1820. It's such a ludicrous story that, you know, a lot of people, when they find out about it, they go, wait, wait, wait, hold on.
Like, people, like, they become Mormon, and then they get deep into it, and then they find out the roots of this, and they go, wait a minute, what the fuck?
I mean, whatever you sit against Mitt Romney, I'm glad he's not the president, but whenever I would see him with his family, I thought, well, you know, why can't our family be a bit more like that family?
I am not glad he's not running for president right now.
I think he's a better choice.
And I was shocked that he wasn't willing to oppose Donald Trump, because I think that that would be a fucking easy run for people that were conservative, that were uncomfortable with this Trump character and all his fucking loose dialogue and all the crazy shit that he says.
I mean, the run-up to becoming the Republican nominee was one of the most embarrassing times ever for the Republican Party because you had all these fools...
Robo candidates almost literally in the case of Rubio was kind of malfunctioning with his his kind of soundbite algorithm was glitching so he's coming out with the same soundbite within 10 seconds But all these robo-candidates, and then someone who seemed like a kind of visceral, flesh-and-blood human on stage, and who, moreover, when he said stupid, crazy stuff, did not then hit the trail to apologize.
He would just keep saying weird things.
And I think people felt like, you know what, he's showing the media for the shell game that it is.
For a lot of people, one of the things that Romney represents that's problematic for people is that not only is his father a Mormon, but he's from one of the most bizarre sects of Mormons, where they left the United States so that they could have multiple wives.
So they didn't want to give up the polygamy aspect of the religion.
So they just went south to Mexico, which was not that much different than the United States back then.
Then, when cars were invented and the United States really exploded and became much more prosperous than Mexico, then ultimately it got even crazier when they got involved in the drug war.
The drug war, where there was drug cartel people were Kidnapping people in the Romney family and other Mormons that are living down there.
So they started like being, they had armed guards on sentry 24 hours.
I mean, it's like a scene from The Walking Dead.
They're all standing there with high-powered rifles.
Like my friend Brian was born in the Philippines, but he's American because he was born on a military base.
No, you can be American, but he was going to be, I mean, but can he be president and not born in the U.S.? Well, in my book, no, because he was not given the God-given right to be born in the right patch of dirt, so fuck him.
I had a bit about this in like 2005. I had a bit about George Bush and that he was so dumb that I don't think that he was really the candidate that the Republicans like the best candidate they could have.
I think he was a test to find out how dumb people are.
Because there's only one way to tell.
The people, the bankers, the industrialists, they don't really know how dumb Americans are.
They know about pop culture.
They know what people like.
And there was only one way to find out.
You put a dumb guy in office, and you see how people react.
And that at the end of the first year, when he won again, or the first term when he won again, I think they were sitting around going, I think we can go dumber.
And they just decided to get some fucking pro wrestling type president.
Some dude who's like a combination of like a drill sergeant and a pro wrestler who just, you know, you just go to Ted Nugent concerts and scoop people up with nets and you just set them up.
And that this is kind of what he is.
I mean, you watch that.
That is like, even the way the audience is yelling along and cheering, it's theatrical.
This is all like a parade.
It's theater.
They don't necessarily think that Obama really founded ISIS. They don't care if he did or not.
There's a lot of things that he says that are absolutely true.
And here's one of the things that I like about what Trump represents.
He is not the political establishment, and the political establishment sucks.
It really does suck.
It is a corrupt, completely corrupt institution.
And what he's saying about crooked Hillary, I agree.
Look, if you look at the Clinton Foundation, you look at what they've been able to do and the laws they've been able to skirt and the amount of influence they're able to have and the amount of money that they're able to generate and where that money goes and how ambiguous it is and how that hasn't been investigated, he's right.
He's right in a lot of ways.
So I hope that a lot of what he's doing is theatrics, and if he does wind up winning, I hope that he puts around him some real political advisors that understand international policy, and he tones everything down at this result.
I agree with what you said about it took an orange-haired casino magnate with pathological lying issues to point out the truth about the brokenness of the American.
We're in a bad place with either one of them, because either one of them are exposing the ridiculous aspects of our society and the ridiculous aspects of our political establishment, our political system.
It's just not a good system.
Representative government doesn't make any sense when people can represent themselves.
It made sense back when it was impossible to get word to Washington how all these people felt.
But now that people...
You're almost saying, by continuing representative government in 2016, you're almost saying that, well, you can't have one person, one vote, because people are too fucking stupid for that.
And if that's the case, we need to fix that instead of just continuing business as usual.
We need to figure out how to expand our educational system or enlighten some of these people, maybe drop mushrooms everywhere or something.
There's got to be a better way than just continuing business as usual when that business has been shown, at least in Hillary Clinton's case, to be completely corrupt.
What I like about Obama is he's measured, he's intelligent, and I think there's one thing that has to be said.
I mean, as much as when you look at politics, you look at someone who's running the president, there's a lot of speculation.
How much power does he have?
What is it like behind closed doors?
What are those meetings like?
Sam Harris is an interesting point.
He's like, is Obama a guy who is lying all along or When he was running for president and then gets in office and does different things like keeps Guantanamo Bay open and doesn't leave Iraq and all the different things that he sort of reneged on?
Or is it that you become president and then you are briefed and then someone sits down and explains to you the horrific nature of the outside world and here are the threats to civilization itself, here are the threats In terms of terrorism, in terms of these different dictatorships that are seeking to gain nuclear arms, and here's some real problems, and here's the strategies, and here's what we have to do, and here's why we can't do what you promised.
There's that, too.
I don't know.
We don't know.
But what Obama does represent, and here's what trickles down, is as a man, he's very measured, he's very intelligent, He's very articulate.
He doesn't lose his cool.
He doesn't respond to nonsense.
And the speeches that he gives, they're a great representative of education, of dignity, of a guy who speaks very well, and a guy who is smarter than most people that you know.
I think there's something to be said for that.
And I think that that is what George Bush wasn't.
And that was what was appealing to me about Obama.
But, you know, but Eve bullshits too, you know?
So it's like, at what point in time do you get to speak your mind?
Do you ever?
Do you ever get to say what you really think?
And if that's what he really thinks, if that's who he really is...
When you're a politician, you are almost required to try to play this game of not pissing people off over expressing your true feelings on things.
Like, you've got to kind of play it as much down the middle.
You know that there's going to be a bunch of people on this side that are going to hate you, there's going to be a bunch of people on that side that don't think you're going far enough, but you shoot down the middle and you get the best results.
It's almost like pretending to be someone who you're not to try to pick people up at a bar.
It's a bullshit act.
And that's what politicians are.
They're bullshitters.
They're really good at bullshitting.
What's bizarre about Trump is that he's not doing that.
Well, temporarily disastrous, but, you know, to be seen whether or not it's ultimately disastrous.
My friend Steve Hilton, who's a very bright guy, who's been on this podcast before, he was David Cameron's right-hand man, he actually is a supporter of Brexit.
That's one of the things that he had a problem with Cameron over.
They had a falling out.
I want to talk to him, sit down with him.
I don't know enough of it.
I don't really follow any politics.
I barely follow the United States.
I didn't know what the fuck Brexit was until it was going down and everybody was saying it was the end of the world.
Well, when I'm talking about representative government, what I'm talking about is like this electoral college set up and the one person, one vote set up and the idea that 300 plus million people are going to be represented by just a handful of people that are representing states.
Yeah, and the way in which Bernie Sanders was marginalized, I think, and likewise, in a way, the fact that Trump could run away with it, I mean, it's just fascinating how he managed to overturn the apple cart.
I haven't really grappled with the minutiae of how US democracy works, but it seems to me like it's a really bizarre, arcane system with the delegates and whatnot.
Well, they came up with it back when there was no communication.
They came up with it back when you had to take a horse and you had to carry a handwritten letter across the country to communicate with people.
And that was just ineffective.
They had to figure out how to have people in your various states and various counties and various districts represent the greater good of the people and also have the ability to decide over the rest of the people.
That's one of the things that people don't even realize.
In representative government, when you have this one person who represents a group of the people, if the group of the people decides to vote for Hillary Clinton, that one person doesn't have to agree with that.
And it's designed for back when people were illiterate.
And there's a bunch of farmers and pilgrims and savages that came over from Europe on rafts and made it to America and just fucking have at it.
And they're trying to manage this and trying to figure out how to take the founding fathers' ideas and best keep it all together while they're exploring this whole new world and dealing with Governing these people that were literally thousands of miles away that you couldn't even reach.
We can do that now.
I mean instantaneously someone can send a Facebook message, they can send an email, they can tweet.
You can find out what people's opinions are.
But then it becomes whether or not these people are qualified to decide which direction the country goes.
Well if they're not qualified, we should probably figure out what the fuck we can do to make people more aware of what are the consequences of all these different decisions that are going to be made by our politicians.
Because There's a lot of stuff that gets made when it comes to disastrous implications for the environment.
I mean, when Obama was in office, he set so much in order or so much in motion that environmentalists and people that are against offshore drilling, I mean, there's a lot of fracking and offshore drilling and all sorts of things that could potentially have disastrous implications that were set forth by him that no one had any say in.
No person in America that was just a regular citizen had any say in these major decisions.
Like, you know, Mark Ruffalo just tweeted something about all the different offshore oil rigs that Obama had agreed to while he was in office, and it's disturbing.
I have to say, as someone who resides in the UK and who's more used to the British system, the biggest shock when you come over here is during the election cycle, the amount of money that gets spent and the length of the campaigns.
And for all its flaws, in Britain, there's a cap on how much they can spend on their campaigns.
So they have like one or two TV ads each.
And then a couple of posters.
But they do not do anything on the scale of what happens here.
And the amount of money that gets spent here is just insane.
So it does seem it has all the hallmarks of a broken system, I would say.
Well, not only that, there's two recognized parties.
And anything else, you're throwing your vote away.
That's the implication.
That's how people think.
And, you know, Tom Rhodes, a friend of mine, he lived in Holland for quite a while.
And he was talking about the variety of candidates to choose from in Holland.
And now they just have so many different people.
They have conservative liberals.
They have conservative Green Party candidates.
They have liberal Green Party candidates.
They have...
I mean, it just goes across this just wide range of different philosophies on how to govern and people get a better sense of, you know, what they would like or what they agree with most.
Because this hard line right and hard line left and this rigid ideology that you have to subscribe to on both sides.
If you're on the right, you don't support gay marriage, you're anti-abortion, you're this, you're that, you want gun rights, you want this, you know, fuck immigration.
You know, there's all this stuff that you have to kind of agree to if you agree to the right.
And then on the left, you have to agree to a lot of things that people, you know, not necessarily agree as well.
So it's so complicated to have a two-party system and try to pretend that there is a real democracy.
And it seems, I mean, I've read in the LA Times that he's already on a mini-rebound based on this semi-apology he delivered last week, and that if he could tone it down a couple of notches and just sort of appeal to a few more women and just seem a little bit less insane, he will climb in the poll numbers.
Well, she's under two criminal investigations, and there's also plenty of video out there where there's a direct contradiction between what the FBI has said they were investigating what she was guilty of, and then what she has said they said.
So she's not honest.
She's just not.
I mean, it's pretty clear when you compare...
Many things to what she said versus the actual facts.
She's a lawyer.
She's a lawyer who became a politician.
She's a career politician.
She knows what to do.
She's got Teflon in her DNA, and she keeps plowing forward no matter what.
She doesn't do interviews.
She's not doing any of these rallies.
She's just going forward, and it's very bizarre.
There's also a lot of questions.
I mean, Dr. Drew did some big thing the other day talking about her health because, you know, she had fallen down in 2012 and apparently like had a blood clot on her brain and really hurt herself really badly.
And at her advanced age, this is a really dangerous condition.
And he talked about her health care and talked about the care that she received and what the diagnosis was.
And he's like, this is not this is dangerous stuff.
And so who knows how much of her behavior because traumatic brain injuries are really significant when it comes to the way your brain works post-injury, the way you behave, impulsive behavior, aggression.
It was called A Different Brain, and it was set in a brain injury rehabilitation clinic in the UK, and it was basically about serious personality changes in the wake of a traumatic brain injury.
As you say, impulsivity, sometimes a lack of empathy, erratic behavior, and it was about people, you know, inevitably it's about the relationships that they're in and the way in which people have to adapt around to the new needs.
And, you know, yeah, it's unbelievable stuff.
I mean, you know better than anyone from your sports kind of interest that post-boxing, post-NFL, post-hockey, if you're a fighter in hockey, and pro-wrestling too.
There's been several terrific documentaries, one by Steve James called Head Games.
And a few others that all examine...
I mean, the levels of erratic behaviour after an NFL career are unreal.
Whether it's divorce, bankruptcy, suicide, or serious depression, it's off the charts.
I've seen it firsthand from friends who became erratic and became really unstable after getting beat a few times in mixed martial arts fights.
I've seen it from boxers, people that I knew when I was young, and then I met them 10-15 years later, and their life was a mess.
They become alcoholics.
Huge issue with their endocrine system and they supplement with alcohol and drugs to try to self-medicate.
It becomes a real problem.
I mean, the brain is very fragile.
It's connected with this very, very soft connective tissue that keeps it in place inside the head.
It's just not meant to be hit that much.
You know you're meant to like survive a few bumps and bruises and that's what it's kind of designed for and anything else especially prolonged continued abuse like that can have dire consequences or one significant injury can have dire consequences.
One significant one can be life-changing, or in the sports context, two concussions, I'm sure you know, back-to-back within a single sort of space of time, like one game.
You know, the first one's not good, but the second one is cataclysmic.
Yes, and it happens a lot of times where people deny the first concussion, and they go right back to playing football, or they go right back to sparring.
Well, I'm no doctor, obviously, but she definitely had a traumatic brain injury.
She fell, and she had a blood clot on her brain.
I mean, this is all open public record, the diagnosis.
When you have a blood clot on your brain at 60-something years of age, that is incredibly dangerous.
It's really bad.
And then you have to address, like, what made her pass out in the first place?
Like, what made her black out when she fell down and hit her head?
That's not good.
I think what we really need in this country is, like, some...
Altruistic Elon Musk type character.
A real genius.
Someone who's like a really brilliant person who sees the state the country's in and offers some intelligent, well thought out solutions.
That doesn't exist because those people are too busy doing whatever they're doing.
So what we're left with is career politicians and then this madman who's a reality TV star, you know, a casino man.
I don't think that our system is good.
I think it's very archaic.
I think it's just not the best we can do.
And I think we're just going to continue to use it until it blows up in our face.
It's like instead of redesigning cars, we've got some Model T, and we keep adding turbochargers to it and fucking bigger wheels.
And someone says, hey, man, I think we can make a better car.
Fuck that!
This is our car!
USA! USA! USA! They keep just slapping bolts and fucking rivets and screwing this thing in place and it's not good.
It's not a good system and it's not the best we can do.
It's certainly not ideal.
And I think human beings in all areas of life other than our political system, we have advanced radically since the 1700s.
If you look at the way we approach education, if you look at our ability to communicate with each other, if you look at technology, the innovation, and the constant expanding of our horizons and possibilities as far as what we're capable of with technology, all those things have radically improved since then.
But we still have this goofy system that was created back when people rode horses, wrote with feathers, and when you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it.
But that's great because that's a great metaphor for the human brain in a way and kind of a big thought to carry as we sort of draw to the close of our interview.
But, you know, because the brain, you know, our brains are hinged around the innermost parts of our brain, the amygdala, which is essentially reptilian in origin, you know.
And so many of our deepest impulses, the sort of fear response and so forth, are programmed from a kind of evolutionary heritage.
You know we've got neuro circuits that go back thousands if not millions of years and you know that metaphor you use to describe our political system of being an old jalopy that's been turbocharged is in essence what our brains are and you know as much as it would be lovely to believe that technology and our ability to control nature and control our environment had been hand in hand with sort of a moral and civilizational You could deduce maybe as many examples that
suggest that all it's done is allowed us to do everything, whether for good or ill, more efficiently and more effectively.
So we can help more people.
We can blow more people up.
You can drive faster, but you can drive faster away from a crime.
Do you know what I mean?
So I don't hold out any huge hope that there will be a positive change.
I think that we're more advanced and more safe now than ever before.
I think if you look back on 2,000 years ago and you look at today, which is a blink in the eye in terms of the age of the Earth, it's infinitely better to live today than it is then.
If you were dropped at random on Earth, Where would you where I mean chances are you wouldn't be Joe Rogan you would probably be what I don't what would you probably be?
Well, there's certainly horrible places working, you know making Apple phones in a factory you could be or you could be in China living in some skyrise being some multi billionaire Cell phone magnate.
Who the hell knows?
You know, I mean, there's certainly some wonderful spots in the world outside of America.
There's certainly some great places to live.
Even if you live in poverty, you could live a wonderful, happy life that's way safer than it would be thousands and thousands of years ago.
The Internet is pretty much worldwide.
Cell phones are pretty much available everywhere now, and so I think that access to communication is going to change the way people view the world because they're gonna have more data to choose from.
They're gonna have more cherry-picking that they can do.
They can certainly have more confirmation bias and stick to their own group like we're talking about with Scientologists who don't go on the internet, don't take any suppressive information, don't watch any videos, and I think I think what I'd like about your approach and what I like about what you're saying when it comes to Scientology is that you're not a mean person.
You're not like mocking them and you don't want to shit on them.
What you want to do is you want to look at them for what they really are and try to get a really good understanding of it.
One of my favorite parts of the trailer was that guy filming you and you're filming him and you go, are you making a documentary too?
Because you don't want to, you know, if I can quote Nietzsche, which is kind of a sophomoric thing to do, but it's the idea of like, you don't, when you, when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks also into you.
Like, when you fight monsters, don't become a monster.
And I don't want to, they're bullies in many cases, and I didn't want to bully them back, and I didn't want to be trapped into a paradigm of us against them.
And I was really trying to say, look, let's keep, I don't want, I don't, I want to see the human in you.
You're talking about a guy who was in it for two-plus decades.
He left, and he's sort of coming clean about all the stupid shit that he did when he was in there.
People become a prisoner of their earliest ideology, the earliest ideology that they adopt.
And that's one of the problems with any sort of a groupthink, whether it's a cult, a religion, whatever the fuck you want to call it.
Ideologies become problematic when you can't escape.
You can't vary.
You have to stick to the dogma.
You have to stick to the doctrine.
And that's not good for people.
It's not healthy.
It's not smart.
Because I think the ability to communicate and open debate is why we've advanced to the point we're at in the first place.
The suppressing of that is almost always someone who has a bad idea that they're trying to shelter.
So when you see people that are chasing after someone because they're trying to communicate about something, like you, who's doing it super respectfully, when you see that, what you have is a bunch of people that are trying to defend a bad idea and defend it with aggression.
What short-circuits their beliefs, what allows them to see something bigger than what they're in is when you treat them with kindness.
And instead of shouting back at them or hurling abuse back, which just reinforces their view of you as an enemy of God or suppressive or however they characterize it, if you actually behave decently in an attempt to Robustly present your position, but in a respectful way.
And coming from a place of caring and empathy, as opposed to a censorious or hostile attitude, that actually can be much more effective.